Many people are left wondering how many calories are actually in a pound of body weight, or a pound fat.
It's important to know when you are embarking on a new strategy to hopefully lose weight and improve the way that you look and feel.
If you understand this figure you'll have a far easier time losing weight and getting rid of that unsightly flab.
A pound of fat in your body has 3,500 calories in it.
It's important to think about what that means.
The recommended dietary intake for many people is between 2,000 and 2,500 calories per day.
This means that just one pound of body fat stored in your body has well more than you eat in day, even on a day when you cheated from your health plan.
Therefore this means that in order to gain a pound of fat, you have to eat 3,500 more calories than your body is putting to use.
This means that on top of the total calories that your body is burning with its normal functioning and any exercise you may or may not be doing, you need to eat 3,500 more superfluous calories in order to gain a pound of fat.
Conversely, this means that in order to lose a pound of fat you have to burn 3,500 more calories than you are ingesting.
This helps explain why some health plans that claim you can lose ten or more pounds a week aren't only unpractical and probably bogus, but also dangerous and unhealthy.
You would be limiting yourself to an extraordinarily low amount of food while working out an extraordinarily high amount.
Any weight program that promises results like this is basing them off of losing water weight, which doesn't amount to losing fat at all.
You're just draining your body of fluids and it's weight that will come right back on at the soonest chance.
You have to find a healthy balance between getting rid of some of those 3,500 calories with exercise and some by eating better.
If you lower your caloric intake from 2,500 calories a day to 2,000, that's 500 per calories day or 3,500 per week! That equals a one pound fat loss per week formula just through improving your diet, and it's healthy, safe and legitimate.
If you exercise a few times a week as well, you can easily boost that figure to 1.
5 or 2 pounds of fat loss per week.
Now that you know how many calories lay in a pound of fat and body weight, you know what kind of expectations you should have for losing weight and what the right ways to go about it are.
If you think you can lose 10 pounds of fat in a week, you're just setting yourself up for failure and misery.
You have to set goals that are achievable, and won't cause you to resort to unhealthy eating patterns or excessive exercise.
The great news is that real, tangible and permanent weight loss is in your grasp with some slight tweaks to your nutritional program and your activity level.